Before wrapping up, I'd be negligent if I didn't credit Roger K. Miller, a fellow writer and Binghamton, New York native, author of a terrific hometown memoir, The Chenango Kid. Serializing a novel, as writers did in periodicals in centuries past, was Roger's idea. I stole it and am grateful for his inspiration and not pointing out my egregious theft.

One last reminder: You can find all my competed books on my Amazon Author Page. The Witch Next Door with will joining the list in late September, after some fixing up, filling up literary potholes and polishing.

Thanks again to all of you whom I have been lucky to have as readers on this blog.

The Witch

It was always going to happen. All things end. There are no exceptions.My last conversation with Val happened almost fifteen years after the Saturday night when we met in a darkened corner at a dance in the gymnasium at the Binghamton Boys Club. Other than obligatory family connections that turn cold without breaking, no one else stayed in my life that long, but now we approached a terminus.I called her only every few months now, checking in, confirming our mutual outsider status, but I never drove or hopped on a bus to cover the short distance needed to see her. No enough switches clicked into the on position, our synergies intermittent.I quit trying to persuade her to come to Buffalo, even for a weekend. It was the one thing we never did, step outside everything else without an easy exit in sight. She balked.“If I do, you’ll never let me leave,” she challenged me.The claim was so unexpected, I didn’t know how to answer. She still drove the old van she asked me to help her check out on the morning I went back to Maggie. It symbolized my self-demolition. But I recovered. I did finally leave Maggie, and I was on my own. I was alone.Was it a challenge? Should I have grabbed the chance, called her out and demanded? No, I could hear her laugh, inspired by one more of my inflatable absolutes. Whatever I might have said to change her mind, I didn’t, and that’s history, now and forever.A year or so after my last invitation, I called on a Saturday evening when I had a half-hour or so to kill and found her home. My call felt less welcome than any had in a long time.Val was restless, stalled while cruising out of her twenties. She told me about some guy she’d met, a guy from Ithaca, and how tempted she was to follow that trail north to a new town and, maybe, another start. My door, always unlocked then, opened and Jodi walked in. We had plans to go see a movie. I raised my index finger to let her know I’d be just a minute. The conversation with Val had already gone on too long. Being dismissed should be brief and to the point. It was past time to admit that tramps on the move from the Sixties had no business trying to finagle their way into the Eighties. We were out of date. Jodi waited on the couch in my living room while Val and I wrapped up. From that day forward, I imagined that Val followed her impulse and settled in Ithaca, a college town where she fed her freethinking intellect and raised children. I wondered if we’d bump into each other again someday. If so, what would we say, if anything? We had nothing left, which I understood later on meant that fate was done with us. We were not going to mess up one more chorus in song.

When you leave so much behind, lucky to serious damage, maybe a bit crippled, a good person hopes the damages done are not more than can be accepted and atoned for. With no brothers guiding me safely past the witches’ doors, I got by with the nerves I had left. Sometimes, that jagged edge was bound to carve wounds.Unprotected, yes, but how long must it take to learn that there are no haunted houses or witches waiting to burn you alive in their ovens? How long before the stain of the witch evaporates and you can’t see it anymore? How long to know it was about the love, never the fear?When my mother died, I was in Vienna with Jodi, visiting a friend. On that very evening, we went to the old Opera House for a concert. Mom was a million miles from my thoughts when the three of us walked across the cold plaza, wisps of snow blowing by the lampposts. No transcendental message reached me, no extrasensory perception chilling my heart.I found out she was gone when I heard a progression of messages on our answering machine when we flew back to New York. No one in my family knew Jodi and I were in Europe. The messages went from somber to frantic to confused. “Must’ve thought I was ignoring them,” I told Jodi.“I’m sorry,” Jodi said.“Well, you know, I feel a little sad, but to be honest, the main thing I feel is relieved I didn’t get stuck flying out there for the funeral.”Such, then, was the state of healing. If you can’t fix it or it’s just too late, cut it loose. I’d won that. Enough time passed to make it stick. If I couldn’t love her, I had no business resenting or mourning her. As for the other shards, currents took most of them out of reach. Once in a while, an exceptional event brings us back in range, but what we sculpted of ourselves left little capacity for reconnection. To have ten siblings, two stepdads and a stepmom and about as much to do with any of them as I have with the manager of the local grocery is probably the worst result you could imagine, if you were me, eighteen years old, hitchhiking your way home to Binghamton, sun setting at a slow intersection, south of Utica. Maybe, that was what I needed protection from all along, not the witches, not the harridans of imagination, but worst of all, the incurable curse of indifference.

Here is the next to last chapter from my serialized novel, The Witch Next Door. To all of you who have stuck with the story, thanks. I'll wrap it up next week, then do the final fixing up and repairing before publication in the fall.

Anyone want to start this story from the first chapter is welcome to click here, then follow the links at the end of each chapter. You can also start in the middle form the "ARCHIVES" on the right.

A Young Man, Amost An Artist, A Failure

Val and I weren’t going to have many more conversations. Attenuated, strains made the fabric less colorful, less resilient.The last time we saw each other, I took her to a party at my cousin’s place. We argued on the way home, the last and only fight we ever had, a dispute so ridiculous I don’t remember what it was about.“You were pretty stressed,” she reminds me. “Conning everyone must’ve gobbled up all your resources.”“Living preposterously will do that. You know that Paul Simon song where he says, ‘Michigan seems like a dream to me now?’”“America. ‘We’ve all come to look for America…’”Val’s voice had not become more tuneful with age.“Binghamton seems a mash to me now,” I paraphrased. “I guess I was falling back all the time, trying to find the America we thought we had.”“Any luck?”“None. You really can’t go home. The most important thing I ever learned in my life, and it applies to everything, is that there aren’t any do-overs, no Mulligans. You get one shot at anything, and that’s it.”“Probably bigger than it sounds,” Val mused.“A truth shrouded in a cliche.”A certain ignorance is required, a fluffing of knowing, in going back to old rooms, thinking you can recover the empty coffee cups, the left behind newspapers or even the carefullest thoughts. If you’re like me, you might someday hit the skids so hard you’re hollow enough to try for it.Recklessness served me well until I hit dry land. It had to. A kid without a mother in a family without enough resources to rebuild beaches after a storm, I bounced around, unable to drop anchor… No, wait. Make that unwilling to drop anchor. Then, the dry land got me.Was it lack of trust in the official version or a passion for freedom? Maybe both, but the latter makes a better story. All my life, I left anything and anyone with too much ease, so much in fact I wonder if I ever really committed to anything other than awareness. Feeling it isn’t enough.That doesn’t bother me much. The adventures recklessness got me were thrilling, even as reminiscence. I did, though, want to know why, if for no other reason than that I’d caused too much damage.Once, when we still went to that big brick school house, one of the last with only two classrooms, the one parked on the hill with the huge yard around it, I fled early one day with my brothers. Only a short time remained before the yellow buses would flex open their doors to let us in for the ride home, but escape was on our minds. Mom’s boys, we ran full speed across the slight slope of the playground toward an opening between the trees, worn down by tire tracks on bare earth. My brothers held my hands, one on each side, to help me keep up, lifting my sneakers off the ground at top speed. We raced into the shade under the arch of free-growing limbs and out into the open spaces on the other side. We laughed, gasping for breath, traipsing along the dirt road, grass edging up past the stubble in the fields around us. Mom’s freewheeling boys.So, we got her love of freedom. We got her loving embrace. I don’t remember any time when we didn’t feel like we were champions, broken winners, of course, but always on top.Then, the thick brick of glass broke up. Each of us became our own shards. Freedom changes season when no one holds your hands and no arms sweep around you when you need a secure landing.By the time Mom called from Virginia, she had four more children, a second set of us, proving her reliability as a baby machine. She called from Richmond, a place I could drive to in a day now, but another universe then. “How are you doing, honey?” she asked. “Is everyone treating you all right?”I didn’t know how to answer that question when I was twelve years old. What did it even mean? I got through things. I got my three months of baseball and a nine month void. Every kindness, encouragement from a teacher, a girl who might like me, was a beam puncturing the redolent gray.“I’m okay,” I said.One day, a neighbor stopped me along the soft shoulder where our driveway met the road, imprisoning me with a stare in the way familiar adults were allowed to then.“Your father’s so proud of all of you,” she cooed. “I saw him the other day after he got all your report cards. You’re all doing so well in school.”“I failed.”“What?”“6B. I failed. I have to repeat.”“Oh.”I remember the raw chill the first time I felt hatred. Not anger, cold, amorphous hatred. Imagining Dad, standing there, smiling proudly, sent icy pebbles bouncing in my brain. The worst hate is the cold one because you’ve already lost.“I really think, Val, the only reason I went on living then was because, as far as I knew, I had no choice. When you have no choice, you have to try to make things better for yourself.”My mind’s eye saw the Nietzsche typed on paper and taped to my teenage bedroom wall: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”Suicide was a raft until conviction surged back.Surge back it did. The first time it powered up, I was sitting on a school bus on Robinson Avenue, watching the other kids leaving East Junior High. I promised myself that I would never make anyone else feel as bad and rejected as they made me feel. “What happened?”“I don’t even remember, but it was the lowest low a thirteen year old can get. I just felt like shit. Nobody cared about me at all, but something inside me knew I could make it. I was better.”“Look out world…?”“Not just yet. I had a lot to learn, but look at me now, all these years later, all the great experiences, a marriage that lasted, money in my pocket…”“Et cetra, et cetra et cetra…”“…and on.”The thing is, when nobody loves you, you can go with the majority, throwing in with the spurning crowd, or you can love yourself with all you’ve got. The stew got frothy for a while, but I’m here because I decided to discover and appreciate the unique creation of me on a chilly spring afternoon in 1962.Bob Dylan, for fifty years now, always seems to have something to tell me:

“Got a pile of sins to pay for and I ain’t got time to hide.”

A reckless seed planted, the other side of loving yourself is not enough left for everyone else. As a reservoir, love’s capacity is limited. There is not enough for every dry season. Some summer morning, sun on your face, the deep greens and soft wind may con you into thinking you have enough love with which to paint the world and have it last a lifetime. Don’t fall for it. It isn’t true, but bless you for wishing it were.

Spring failed toward summer in 1966. I hung out in an abandoned office into June, pretending to peddle encyclopedias after my boss quit, then cold calling door to door with a team while a new sales manager tooled around the rural roads, picking us up and dropping us off. Riding shotgun, I listened with my boss outside a trailer while Jerry, a big, burly, rambunctious guy out of New York City did his pitch.“This is the only time I ever come between a man and his wife,” Jerry bellowed, voice whirling through the screen door, spreading out into the night.He was parking his big ass between a couple he’d charmed into submission, unfolding a pleasantly colored contract on a coffee table in front of them.“If you watch closely, you’ll see that my fingers never leave my hands.”Bill, our sales manager behind the wheel, and I joined Jerry’s customers in laughter.Ten minutes later, Jerry thumped into the backseat, still stuffing materials in his briefcase.“You got ‘em?” Bill asked, turning slightly toward the rear, sure of the answer.“I got ‘em. Fucking yahoos. Had ‘em eating out of my hands. Didn’t know what hit ‘em. ‘Your encyclopedias will arrive in about ten days. I’ll come by to make sure everything’s just like I promised.’ Sure I will.”“Fuck you, Jerry. You’ll be back in the garment district, selling cheap underwear, by then.”Jerry’s encyclopedia selling career was a lark, a week long jaunt for easy money upstate. Even then, New York City was way more than two-hundred miles away.When Bill invited me to play gypsy with him and travel to Springfield, Massachusetts, to sell books there, I was so loose I barely had to lift anchor. Springfield was where he hid his pregnant girlfriend while his wife and children got weekends in Utica. On Sunday, I left my room at the YMCA for breakfast at a downtown diner. Without cold calls to go on, I went walking, stopping halfway across an old bridge over the Connecticut River, the full green foothills girdling the valley, much like my home in Binghamton, both spaces markers where I waited to identify myself in place. Like most of my past and many times again in my future, I was open to whatever was going to come. I had no direction and little that pulled me.By week’s end, with Bill’s situation untenable and me like a deadweight on his tether, he delivered me back to New York, leaving me on the corner where Route 20 on its poor man’s track parallel to the State Thruway intersected Route 12. 12 angled 90 miles south through the farmlands and forgettable towns until spilling into Binghamton. I was going home.I stood by the side of the road, putting my thumb out as cars crossed the intersection with the traffic signal. No hurry, nowhere to be. “Well, man,” I said to myself as if there was a conversation waiting, “you finally hit bottom. Your friends are jerk offs who cheat on their wives, and the only job worse than the one you just lost is magazine salesman. What’s next? The circus?”It struck me as funny with a wide-open future ahead of me, as a train wreck of a life might seem at eighteen, a comedy of my own ridiculous design. I’d hurt everyone who cared about me. I left Ginny to fend for herself, running off to distract myself by jumping the bones of just about every girl who got in the vicinity of “Yes,” until dwindling down to a graveled patch of “Maybe.” Joyce, I seemed to have assisted into the gutter. My family…? Mutually assured destruction, I thought.You can look at yourself from every angle and never run out of angles. I should be patient with myself. I didn’t know which one of those people I was or, consequently, where I was going with my choices.Tramps, we used to call them, idling, nothing to do but absorb life, unsure about living it.The long, August dusk softened the broken down, reemerging forests and earnest farm fields around me. Inside, I still felt happy; outside, lost or unfound. There’s a quiet inside every humid summer dusk. Disruptions, cars — for instance, are exaggerated by the violence of disrupting it. At eighteen, the future is so vast, it either thrills or frightens the shit out of you. Cling to security and you’re a dead duck; don’t and you’re likely to cause some damage. You have to hope it’s recoverable damage.Who had a map? Who could tell me anything? Had anyone been here before? Holden Caulfield came close, but he was so weak and envious. Would Holden have maneuvered his awkward way into Mary Jane’s bed, back in California, or looked away, saving it for wittily protective anecdotes? No, there was nobody else much like me.Soon, Henry Miller would soak my brain with insights available nowhere else. Although I would never be an emigre banging my way through Paris, I recognized that same, hard oneness, me against the world, laughing at it, jabbing it, letting love take me over without falling completely for it, my own best resource. Friends came and got discarded. If I survived losing my brothers, a fate well on its way to completion, I could lose anyone and anything and still go on.Like Henry, I stayed sane by writing about it, intellectualizing everything as a way of throwing a tarp over the convulsions, contents abandoned but neutralized.On the cusp, I didn’t know this was coming as dusk deepened on the road south of Utica, but I felt goddamned happy. I was free. No one had been allowed to do more harm than I could survive.

We Kicked an Empty Can Down the American Road is chapter fifteen from my serialized novel, The Witch Next Door.

We will be wrapping up the story in a couple of weeks. If you are new to it or just need a refresher, you can start at the beginning by clicking here and following the links at the end of each chapter.

Thanks to those of you who have been following all along. I hope this has been an enjoyable way to get in some free, extra summer reading.

We Kicked An Empty Can Down The American Road

Easy enough now, looking back, to see the decline from a distance, the eroding bulwark, the leaky center that failed to hold, pools of discontent washing against it, no good light at the end of any tunnel. Time clarifies. Up close, you’ve still got to live your life. The churn of events obscured the horizon in every directions.Drenching rain flooded the gutters the first time I rode a bus in downtown Buffalo, a city taller, faster and more tightly wound than Binghamton, the town where my hometown draft board sent me on a false lead. The last forty-eight hours, I’d bounced from one unfamiliar place to the next stranger until I landed in a square where I had to figure out which building housed the local Selective Service offices. One reason I’ll always love Buffalo, that Buffalo, was the kindness that helped me get the wobble out of my skinny legs. My witch protectors were gone — forever as it turned out. But my strangers were there, again.Our first morning in Buffalo, Cindi and I left boxes still filled with books and vinyl records and walked for the first time through Forest Lawn, the sprawling central cemetery, the scenic route we’d walk many times, from Delaware Avenue to Main Street. We followed a map bought at a gas station to Leroy Avenue where my draft board, after turning down my own choices — VISTA, the Peace Corps and Sloan Kettering Hospital — promised me a job “in the national interest.”Except it wasn’t.“They send conscientious objectors here without warning me,” the executive director at the vocational rehab center said. “I wish I had jobs for all of you, but I don’t.”“Motherfuckers,” I swore as Cindi and I traipsed back across Forest Lawn, old growth trees soaring overhead, softening the rumble of the city. “What am I supposed to do now?”“I don’t know,” she answered. “We got this far. We’ll think of something.”Back in our apartment, I found the previous tenants telephone still had a dial tone. Traffic on Delaware Avenue, buses the loudest, rumbled one story below. I called our landlord. After a year of waiting to get directions that turned out to be bogus, I buzzed with a need to fend for myself.“Sorry to do this, man, but now that we’re here, I found out my draft board fucked me. There’s no job here. We have to go back home. We don’t have any money. Can we get some of our rent back?”“Don’t panic. Maybe I can do something. I’ll call you back,” he said.I called the Friends Committee in Philadelphia. Quakers had set up a national resource for conscientious objectors. “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” the guy who picked up my call advised. “They’ll just come and get you and charge you with draft evasion. Nobody cares if they’re the ones who screwed up. They’ve got a war to run, and you’ll get zero sympathy for getting stuck in Buffalo when other guys are dying in Vietnam.”“So, what the fuck do I do then?”“The only thing I can suggest is finding a job there somehow, something that qualifies.”In town for one day, I had no idea where I’d start looking and decided, on the spot, to ignore him and, one way or another, get back to Binghamton, even if Cindi and I had to hitchhike.“Try a hospital,” he suggested. “The draft boards like to think of working in the national interest as conscientious objectors cleaning toilets and shuffling bedpans.” “I don’t know what to do,” I told Cindi, who stood by, handing me cigarettes while I talked fast into the phone, scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas. I’d gotten used to the idea of not going to jail after all. Now, it was coming back, along with some guilt about what I’d accepted. Peace felt worth going to jail for, but cleaning bedpans? It was like sitting on my ass watching sitcoms while a tornado tore up the town outside.“Great. The fucking phone’s dead.” I slammed the receiver down. “They must’ve caught me making that last call to Philadelphia.”We looked at each other, then around the room.“We should just pack up whatever we can carry and go catch a bus home,” I thought out loud. “What are we going to do with all the books, leave them here? I guess…”Someone knocked on our door. Our lives were about to change.Our across the hall neighbor, Susan, a hippie woman our age, was there. Cindi and I met her when we were unloading.“Sorry to bug you guys, but Marty’s on the phone. He said he couldn’t get through on yours. Is something wrong with your phone?”“With our phone and a lot more…”Marty was our landlord of one day.I followed Susan into her apartment, relieved to see hippie it was, with lots of cushions and color. Record albums leaned randomly against the furniture, curtains thrown open for lots of light.“Hello.”“I think I can help you,” Marty said.“Really? Like how?”“I have a friend at Buffalo General, a doctor, but he’s also a writer, like you. He just published his first novel. He thinks he might be able to get you a job there.” Two fast interviews later, I carried a letter to the local draft board in Buffalo, asking to get the hospital approved for my two years service “in the national interest.” It was raining like crazy outside, and I was soaked.“This should be okay,” the clerk said. “We’ll need to confirm with your draft board in Binghamton, but I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t approve it.”Outside, in a square dominated by department stores and a county library sprawling east like a squared off supertanker on dry land, a damp sun burned through a break in the deep overcast. There wasn’t a lot of time to think. First, I had to figure out how to get home in this complicated city with its radiant street patterns, then get my head right for starting a job for which I was manifestly unqualified. “If I were you, I wouldn't say anything about your draft status,” the department manager told me. “A lot of the guys are veterans from World War II. They won’t understand.”Identity scrubbed, I wandered in the next afternoon, a maintenance man on the evening shift, my specialty: cleaning air-conditioning filters in a two block hospital complex.From the inside, I watched the America hallucination, Buffalo its microcosm, fall apart. For twenty years, I saw how destructive unfixed plumbing and ignored infrastructure can be.

Speeding southwest on the New York State Thruway, on my way to a business appointment in Meadville, Pennsylvania, I was wrong, thinking as I listened to Nixon resign that something better would struggle like a phoenix out of the disaster he created, the promise of the Sixties in America might surface.I’d been living in Buffalo for five years. Cindi left me after one year. I married someone else and became a father. The Sixties radical who flew solo without wings in defying the draft and the war sold life insurance now, his future an island so small and fruitless you might skip it if you spotted it on the horizon. He did.Nixon was the biggest of the worst in 1974, and in the grand American tradition of never accepting responsibility for wrongdoing or expecting it from our leaders, we forgave his crimes. Ford looked the nation in the eye and said that healing meant pretending a monster never stalked our neighborhood. His Dr. Strangelove, Henry Kissinger, walked free too, neither facing trial for killing hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, smashing Cambodia on their own authority and lying about it or even for myriad, lesser political corruptions. We were ordered to look the other way, and that was enough.Sprawling acres of steel plants got torn down south of Buffalo. The stink and smoke that introduced you to Lackawanna as you rode high up on the skyway cleared, vistas toward the lake now marked by scars of demolished plants and wasted shoreline. Jobs went too. Nothing got fixed, although talking about fixes was a popular game at election time.“Bedlam Steel,” as my friend George called the stretch of foundries and sheds strung across the west face of Lackawanna, was prosperous enough to pay him well for filling in for vacations each summer. He was expected to do little more than rest up before returning to school. He hid away in the rafters and edited his poems.“It’s crazy in there, but the money’s great, especially when you consider it’s for doing nothing,” he said, smiling but puzzled.It was a symptom, standards and values discarded. A little to the east, Republic Steel was also flattened in South Buffalo. Without enough Walmarts or McDonalds to absorb the slack, headlines lamented each wave of layoffs in pulsing boldface. Jobs went away. Taxes that paved roads and uniformed police and firemen blew off with them. From shore to shore, it was the same. Prosperity buffering structural weaknesses for decades went away, leaving exposed a sickly consumerist culture, its heart distributed around thousands of shopping malls. Anyone willing to look saw that America was a shattered illusion that didn’t mean anything anymore. The American Dream was a distraction for television, in reruns, waiting for a next season. The Civil War limped into a featureless phase, lead by colorless men in suits.

“How did all that make you feel?” Val asked.“As much as I saw of it — clearly,” I said, “I was mostly ambiguous. How could anyone with healthy lungs feel badly about Bethlehem Steel’s pollution no longer stinking up square miles from Lake Erie all through Lackawanna? I felt sorry that so many people didn’t have good-paying jobs to go to anymore, but why didn’t anyone come up with better alternatives? Where was the leadership?”“You might’ve just as easily asked whatever became of America?”“Jesus, yes, all those windbags going on and on about the American Dream and how they were going to preserve that and the family farm too. They fed their mush to an audience craving something easy to digest, some simple, half-assed fable to believe in. God forbid they’d have to turn off their televisions and think.”“A little harsh, aren’t you?”“It’s a reaction. As the Seventies waltzed on, I developed an allergy to bullshit. We still had a chance, I thought, for a while there. When Carter let the draft dodgers come back, it seemed like we might be growing up after all. Then, we all bought into the superannuated actor, the hood ornament, and things went downhill fast, the them versus us thing got rolling.”“It was always there.” She waved off my argument. “Prosperity just kept it fat and quiet, but since that all depended on an open-ended state of war, when the war machine slowed down, the American illusion caved. It’s not so complicated.”

When Cindi and I packed up our books and records, leaving the boxes for her brother and stepfather to load onto their pickup the next day, we got on the Greyhound to Buffalo with just a couple of bags. Since learning where we were going, we talked about making the return trip in two years. In the fog of big changes, a fix like that keeps your head balanced. But if we looked the other way, rolling back two years, I was engaged to Maureen, about to start my last year of high school, and Cindi was in exile, staying with a family friend in Florida. Two years was so much longer than two years, at least for us and our uncommon step styles.We’d shucked everything except each other. It was foolish, especially in a world as much in flux as ours to guess at anything two years down the road. But we did. It kept us on our feet.

Take the Last Exit is the 14th chapter in my serialized novel, The Witch Next Door. For those of you who have been reading the weekly installments, I want to let you know we are nearing the end. The last chapter will be posted by the end of August.

Then, after going back to fix the potholes, missing pieces and so on, I'll release a final version, in print and eBook, probably in September. Depends on how many repairs need to be made.

If you're a newcomer or just got lost on the way, you can find the first chapter by clicking here. All following chapters and connected by links at the end of each one.

Take the last Exit

Never knowing for sure but sensing it was the last summer I’d see summer fill the leafy hills bracing the rivers around Binghamton, I walked down Hawley Street a little after noon, most days. Trees sagged over the sidewalks, the run of shade broken by the back entrance to Sears Roebuck. One o’clock was my time to take over for Joe at the secondhand, wooden desk in the second floor walk up office of the Broome County Peace Center. I liked the days when Joe stuck around to talk shop. Peace was even less popular then. The office became too quiet after he left.In 1968, peace activists were a blot on the landscape of American muscle-flexing. Shoving our uniforms and flag in the world’s faces made for a healthy economy. The Chamber of Commerce sang that tune all day long, and the customers danced. For Joe and me, the job of selling peace was like persuading a tuned up bulldozer with a tankful of gas to go weed and water a flower garden instead of crushing undefended, Third World landscapes. We doubled as draft counselors. In one exciting episode, we helped plan the escape of a deserter into Canada. Our blows against the machine were minuscule, pin pricks, but at least we were doing something.Mostly, we played out the summer as hippies. A roughened landscape threw our friends into sharp contrast.“The problem,” Joe told me, “is that we never developed a leadership class in America. We end up with the bozo with the biggest mouth and easiest morals. Somebody decent comes along, they kill him.”In a decade poisoned by assassinations and racist murders, the details needn’t be talked through. We saw what happened, and we knew why. We expected worse.The landscape grew cluttered with things undone.One miserable June morning, my clock radio yanked me awake, telling me someone shot Bobby Kennedy in the head. Excited, I’d stayed up late to watch the California returns, not dragging myself upstairs until I knew Bobby won. Now, I flung my sheet on the floor and screamed, “Fuck!”I was alone in the house. Disbelief rocked the fog out of my head. They couldn’t do this again.A celebrity linked to the Kennedy family — Andy Williams, I think — seized a place in front of the camera to ease fears. “Bobby Kennedy,” he said, “will live to play touch football again.” It was a thoughtless resurrection of a legacy. Everyone inside the hospital already knew it was over. Bobby would never play anything again. No thought would echo in his mind or crease his brow. You get one brain. When it’s shot, so are you.“If McCarthy can pull it off at the convention, maybe there’s a chance,” Joe speculated, a couple months later.Our minority was so small, we had to pump it up by junking realism. Not only would McCarthy never get a chance against the machine, not even a voice, but the Democrats, our only hope, were gearing up to turn loose cops to kick the shit out of unarmed hippies.Val watched it on TV. “I couldn’t believe it was happening in America,” she told me over the phone that night. “The cops were pushing protestors through plate glass windows and beating them with clubs. It was all on TV.”“The whole world’s watching,” the protestors chanted at the rioting cops. “The whole world’s watching.”What difference did that make? The international bully marched like a shredder on wheels through impoverished Vietnamese villages. What were a few bruised hippies to the coordinators of massacres?“Doesn’t look good, though, does it?” Joe asked.Neither of us saw what was coming, McCarthy’s losing the least of it.“We’ve always got Vice President Lump.”Joe shook his head.“The peace candidate.”That summer, 1968, we were losing. Our best hope was to make it uncomfortable for mass murderers, dance and drop out and make them look like mindless mastodons trampling the harvest. And I was swinging looser than ever.There was the break with my family, a swamp of unfriendly chemistries, viscosities so unalike we spilled off in separate streams, divided by bulky mountains. It wasn’t new, but the times became charged around us. When I leaked off — or dropped out as we said then — nobody hustled over to bring me back, and I didn’t look over my shoulder. It was mutual. We’d given up on each other.After collecting my diploma, I knocked around a bigger, emptier house with just Dad still there. We didn’t cross paths often. I came in late. He left early. Together for an evening, we passed it playing chess, his dazzling ability to concentrate winning out over my habit of being carried away with passions buzzing between my ears. I was never angry with him anymore. I liked him. He’d shed acid layers of unhappiness as we grew up and released our grips, exposing a gentleness that hadn’t gotten enough air to breathe before. He either didn’t notice or, more likely, didn’t care that my hair descended over my ears, a radical statement against the establishment in those days.My brothers noticed. It was an unlucky coincidence when I waited for the light to change at Washington and Court on a Saturday afternoon and my brother pulled up, his family with him, staring out the windows of his car. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months. “Jesus Christ!” he declared through the driver’s side window. “Oh, no, forget it. It’s just my brother.”This passed for humor in 1968.My other brothers were worse, having assumed I didn’t exist, long hair or short, living or dead. Years passed. The guys who once defended me from witches were gone.Love’s a fluid. But broken, it hardens into bricks like glass. Fluids reconnect, seeking a level. Bricks of glass just sit there. They can’t be rejoined, all hopeful illusions aside.In the heated jumble of elements we all swam in, chemicals swirled, separated, recombined and reacted.TV, magazines and newspapers aligned to paint a picture of hippies that none of us recognized. If we hated the cruelties of war, they posted us up as passive flower children, simple and innocent — and stupid. Women demanding equality? Bra burners. Activists for racial equality? Nigger lovers. When we dreamed about expanding consciousness, we were doped up hippies and naval gazers. Before the Sixties, status quo was a discardable term. During, it lifted up like a concrete bunker. After, it refused to let anything undissolved erode its surface. Nixon saw it. He mobilized the “silent majority,” an amalgam of haves aligned against change or giving up turf, determined to continue dominating the world and gobbling its resources. Silently. The silent majority redefined America as something new: theirs, exclusive, without concessions.And there was our merry band, barefoot, musical and high. Of course, we lost. Groups weakened by empathy usually lose. In the mosh pit of America, dropping out carried with it a gift for seeing clearly, detached and at a distance. A small, unarmed legion of what the news managers put their minds together to call “radicals” charged like fools against a muscled monster in power. Really, it surprises me to this day how much we got done, we were so outnumbered. We couldn’t end the Vietnam War. The monster lost that all by itself, lumbering along, overweight, passionless, guided by something less than Mensa candidates. But we made everyone aware enough of the deranged mentality of persistent war that fifty years passed before the dozing silent majority gave in again to the Pentagon propaganda machine. And that was just the political side. At home, we upended everything, and the landslide keeps rolling downhill.Sorting out relationships took an unfamiliar, new world slant.Cindi and I read books, took long walks and listened to music on the stereo she hooked up in her studio apartment. Sometimes we read together out loud, taking turns with chapters from Up the Down Staircase and The Harrad Experiment. By summer’s end, I moved in with her, although we kept our amateur marriage open.All things in a tangle around us, my draft board ordering me to get on the bus to Syracuse to pee in a little bottle, we dropped farther out. Cindi first rented a place with my sister on the West Side. Nothing better to do, I’d hang out all night with her, having sex on the couch, then walking up the quiet streets to the all-night Dunkin’ Donuts, wandering a little more until dawn leaked down between the foothills along the Susquehanna. This went on for a few weeks until my sister summoned the morality patrol, otherwise recognized as my brother.After a meeting with the other Peace Center coordinators, I walked down Main Street, passing Central High as daylight cooled on the sidewalks. Across from the school, Montgomery Ward managed to survive. The got over my leaving them, two years before, without a qualified stock boy/sporting goods salesman on an ugly, gray Monday when I lost Ginny, my apartment and my faith all at once. I economized, getting my personal devastation gathered together for one big bomb. Early evening throwing long shadows from the soon to be lost American Elms, I glanced down Mather Street, past the phone booth where I shivered in the cold to get my turn at talking with Ginny, where I stood like a trained ape on the Monday when everything went to hell and waited for a call that never came. It took a year to heal and another to figure out who I wanted to be: the freethinking hippie writer and peace activist I was right now.I turned the corner from Main and saw my brother waiting on the sidewalk.“You’re not going inside,” he told me, without my asking.“What about…?”“She’s not here. Her mother and father came to get her and took all her stuff with them.”“What the fuck’s going on?”“Well,” he shrugged, “I’m throwing you out. You weren’t supposed to move in. You had no business spending all your time here. And what was going on… Jesus, come on. Up all night on the couch, your sister trying to sleep in the next room?”I found a phone booth and dialed Cindi’s parents’ number. Surprisingly, her mother let her take the phone.“What happened?”“When I came home from work, your sister and brother were waiting for me, just standing there in the kitchen. They had all my clothes stuffed in brown paper bags. I couldn’t believe it. Then, my mother and father rang the bell. Your brother must’ve called them and told them whatever he wanted them to think. Maybe I’m a whore, your know? I had to go with them. Where else was I going to go?”Circumstances mold reality.Next morning, I helped Cindi to settle in temporarily with Lloyd, one of the other Peace Center coordinators, one too involved with dope to be relied on but a good guy generally. I assumed Lloyd would try to fuck Cindi and maybe would, but our choices were few until she found a place of her own.Why I never fell in love with her is more mysterious to than why I fell in love with anyone else when it just seemed to coalesce out of ephemeral chaos. The way the cards stacked up, Cindi and I were a perfect match that didn’t click into place that way. Maybe the love thing had been swept out of me. Maybe there was just too much else going on to make room for that kind of love.I’ll always remember the first time I noticed her, It was so odd. On my way out of the small convenience store next to school, consuming my then standard lunch of Coca Cola and potato chips, I turned back after she passed and saw her calves. No kidding. Her calves. Before or since, I never got hot over anyone’s lower legs, but it happened. The mysteries of the human heart… or wherever it is that attachments swirl into form. We started spending time together, sharing our stories. She was as hippie as me, wrote poetry, hated the war and was also jumping away from a screwed up family. We swung together through the last months of school. Enough tradition lurked under my hair to get me into a rented tux for our prom, and when my diploma was handed to me, I raised it over my head to wave it at the top row of bleachers where she was sitting, getting the only laugh of the evening. God only knows why I felt good about that, being a four time dropout. It left me with no way to stay out of the draft. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. Nothing scared me anymore, except the dark, another story all its own.I imagined Mabel, the clerk at my draft board, waiting with an induction letter in her hand. A diploma touched my fingers, she dropped her envelope in the postal box. The killing machine wanted my body. I went into a kind of stall. After ducking out of my physical for the Navy, I decided I was never going into any military boot camp. As the war heated up, consuming my friend Denny and others, seeming all the crazier as time passed, I knew wasn’t going there either. “Are you willing to go to federal prison for your beliefs?” Eugene asked me, the first time I climbed up the stairs to the Peace Center, following up on a story in the newspaper.“Compared to Vietnam, killing and being killed, do I have another choice?”Eugene founded the Peace Center, raising money for rent and a telephone, and counseled guys like me about dealing with our draft boards. He looked the part, too, with long brown hair, the serious glasses of a student devoted to reading and an earnestness expressed in gestures.“You’ve already got your notice?”“Just for a physical, so far. I have to catch the piss in a bottle bus to Syracuse next week. Bastards move fast.” Cindi sat next to me and squeezed my hand.“The war’s worse than they’re admitting in the newspapers. They need a lot of bodies. They go after guys without deferments like you’re red meat.” “So, do I just refuse and go to jail or what happens?”“We can stall for a while. Who knows? Maybe the election will motivate Johnson to settle the war before Nixon weasels his way in. You’d still get drafted, but without a war, it’s a whole different situation.”Eugene adjusted his brown, framed glasses and swept some hair behind his left ear. “By stalling, I mean that you do what you should have done a year ago, if anyone was around to explain your options. You file as a conscientious objector.”“Am I qualified? I thought…”“You go to church?”“Fuck no.”“Then, you’re not qualified, but that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to file. You always have a right to try. It slows the process. They won’t induct you while your application’s being considered. They’ll shoot you down. They shoot everyone down. But you appeal. They have to wade through that too. Take the maximum time allowed for every step. The longer it takes, the better chance you have that things will get better.”“Should I start going to church?”“It’s too late now, but don’t let this be too big a joke. The most likely thing that will happen is that you end up with two years in federal prison.”“Jesus… Well, better than dying and killing for nothing,” I said.“Well, here’s the other thing you need to know.”He looked at me seriously.“Draft evasion,” he said, “is the only felony that does not disqualify you for being drafted again. They can just keep drafting you. They’ve been doing that.”

Cindi found the studio apartment on Hawley Street in one day. Furnished, it was easy to settle into. A small kitchen was just off the main room, a shared, but well-kept bathroom upstairs. When I kissed her goodbye, the first night, and walked up tp Court Street to hitchhike home, she was too tired to care about being alone. In spite of what my family claimed, we had not shacked up or planned to. For my part, I hadn’t planned to do anything.As a draft eligible young man in perfect health in 1968, I’d have to be delusional to imagine I had much to say about my future. The war owned my generation, whether we went, skipped or conjured a respectable excuse to stay. Since I would not fight a preposterous battle against a tiny country set up as an enemy, my choices were going to jail or abandoning my country for Canada. The frosty north was starting to look attractive. Whatever I picked, the chapter had to close by the end of summer.Eugene’s strategy for stalling in motion, I helped Cindi get settled, thinking I had around six weeks to survive under my own power. A sea change was coming. I couldn't stop it. My family now as finished with me as I was with them, likewise for Cindi, I started staying overnight, then moved in full time. So it was that Cindi held my hand when I sat for draft counseling and kissed me goodbye me at the door when I got on the bus to Syracuse for my pre-induction physical. We learned to cook the simplest meals for each other, making a ritual of rigatoni in butter and garlic sauce, and five mornings a week, I went out in the fresh light to meet her when she walked across the Susquehanna River bridge after working all night. Hippies, we agreed that marriage was unnecessary, but expected by everyone else. Nothing about our lives was settled. For now, we bought cheap, matching wedding rings at Woolworths and cooked up a story about taking a bus to North Carolina, where we were old enough without consent, and getting a marriage license. The fiction satisfied our landlord, and it surprised us how readily everyone we knew accepted what we told them. Eventually, we even got to spend New Year’s Eve in Cindi’s old bedroom, her parents asleep nearby, without, as they said then, benefit of matrimony.Without a future, we cobbled together a working present. We waited. I wrote my first novel, and the least expected thing of all happened — my draft board decided they did not want me in their Army.